I like this cartoon for a couple of reasons: It encapsulates much of our country’s early history, and it reminds us that this is a very complicated story. It is a story of mixed motives and mixed results. I think there is a problem within the evangelical Christian community in sticking to a simple story line, especially when it suits certain polemical interests and discounts some of the baser, uglier sides of the story that may not fit.

The cartoon reminds me, in particular, that the pursuit of mammon as well as the pursuit of religious liberty played a role in the founding of our country. I think we are dishonest if we don’t acknowledge that fact. I think as Christians we have a special and awesome responsibility to try to pursue the truth and stick to it in our telling of history. Who tells the story and how one tells the story is obviously very important.

Is the United States Constitution a godless document? Is it a godless text? Does it evince a "political atheism," to use a very popular Nineteenth Century phrase? Is it insufficiently attentive to the vital role of religion in American public life? This may be a question that surprises you. If it does, it will surprise you to know that this is a question that has been asked from very credible sources since 1787, and I will hopefully give you a flavor of that. But this is a question that has been asked by pious citizens and by very serious and sober citizens since the text emanated from the Philadelphia Convention in 1787.

No 'God' in the Text

Now, it is indeed striking that when one looks at the Constitution there is an absence of an implicit acknowledgment of the Deity or the Christian religion. Invocation of the Deity to attest to or authenticate a document has been a tradition that predates the Christian era, especially for a framing document like a constitution -- it was certainly part of the American tradition. If you look at any of our basic founding documents -- for example, the "Declaration of the Cost, Causes, and Necessity of Taking up Arms" in 1775 (which in some respects is a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence) -- they make reference to the Deity. The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, they all make reference to the fact that they are operating from a theistic sort of foundation. Virtually all state constitutions and other official documents are replete with claims of Christian devotion and supplication to the Supreme Being. So I think this omission of reference to God from the U.S. Constitution is rather interesting.

Now there are some arguably slight references to the Deity and Christian custom in the Constitution. Nonetheless, there is no clear affirmation of the existence of a superintendent, transcendent Being, and no acknowledgement that society and civil government are dependent on and governed by God. Members of the Constitutional Convention noted this omission both when they were trying to sell the document and when they were opposing the document. Similarly, critics in the state ratifying conventions noted what they called a “defect” in this proposed national charter.

Early Language Critics

During the ratification debates (and well into the nineteenth century), there were persistent and vocal critics of the document who protested its failure to mention God. For example, William Williams (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), had this to say in February of 1788. He would have required “an explicit acknowledgment of a Being, of a God, His Perfections, and His Providence, and to have prefixed to it and stand as the first introductory words of the Constitution.” And then he launched into what he would have had as the Preamble -- think how this contrasts with the Preamble that we ended up getting. This will give you a flavor. He wrote:

We the people of the United States in a firm belief of the Being and Perfections of the one living and true God, the Creator and Supreme Governor of the world, in His universal Providence and the authority of His laws, that He will require of all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful powers among men are ordained of and immediately derived from God. Therefore, in a dependence on His blessings and acknowledgment of His efficient protection in establishing our independence, whereby it has become necessary to agree upon and settle a constitution of federal government for ourselves.

Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence (and one of the framers who was most interested in theologically concerned issues), similarly complained: “Many pious people wished the name of the Supreme Being had been introduced somewhere in the new Constitution, perhaps an acknowledgment may be made of His Goodness or His Providence in the proposed amendments to the document.”

In 1789, a Presbyterian wrote to George Washington and made a similar complaint: “We should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgment of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, inserted somewhere in the Magna Carta of our country, the Constitution.”

The documents of this era are filled with this kind of a concern. Some of it was the basis of the opposition to the Constitution, but some of it was just asking why we didn’t at least acknowledge the Supreme Being, which was part of our tradition.

And so, it is not without cause that we ask, do we have a godless Constitution?

A Radically Secular Text?

The Constitution, I think, is a secular text -- if by that term nothing more or less is signified than the absence of manifest religious content that used the terminology that we were accustomed to seeing in our public documents.

But did the framers have something more radical in mind? Did they omit religious references as a calculated secular design to eliminate religion in a public sphere in the public institutions of our society? There has always been a distinct group, a minority, I think it is fair to say, that includes extreme Deists, liberal religionists, rationalists, free-thinkers, secularists, agnostics, and even some Calvinists, who have maintained that the Constitution’s failure to acknowledge God evinced an intent by the framers to create a wholly secular polity, one that discontinued all connection between civil government and religion or that indicated official indifference or even hostility towards religion.

There is a certain irony that there was this subculture within evangelical society in the early nineteenth century that said that we have a godless Constitution. In many respects it is their descendants who today have turned the argument around and said, “No. In fact, what we have is a Christian document that is being disregarded.” So here is a slight historical contrast of some interest.

Only Negative References to Religion

There are two substantive references to religion in the amended federal Constitution. Both are purely negative or prohibitive in character. The first and only one in the un-amended text is in Article Six, clause three of the Constitution, which states: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The second comes in the amended Constitution -– of course, I am referring here to the First Amendment –- which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

I think it is fair to say that, despite these voices I have highlighted, for much of American history it has been a largely unchallenged assumption that America was in some sense a Christian, if not a Protestant, society -- not in any particular denominational sense, but more generally as manifested in traditions and institutions and values and symbols and the like.

But if you look on the face of it, these two provisions in the Constitution, Article Six and the First Amendment, can be viewed as somewhat problematic for religious traditionalists who saw America as a Christian Commonwealth. In what sense can it be said that a nation is Christian when its fundamental law explicitly prohibits civil government from administering religious tests for public office-holders, or establishing religion, or inhibiting its free exercise? More generally, how can a nation be called “Christian” when its fundamental charter pledges allegiance to no God, affirms no faith, recognizes no church, and has placed itself on a non-transcendent foundation?

In answer, I am going to start by talking about these two substantive provisions in the Constitution: the no-religious test provision of Article Six, and the First Amendment.

No Religious Tests

Even at the time, the Article Six religious test ban generated some controversy. It was a departure from the practices of the time that we were not to require office holders to affirm belief in the “Deity,” or something of that nature. Critics said that Article Six suggested an inattentiveness to the vital requirement of a society to ordain moral rulers, rulers committed to protecting and assisting religion. There is a kind of underlying assumption that you can’t have moral rulers who are not, in some sense, informed by religious principles or a religious ethic. And once it is conceded that not all religions are conducive to good civil government and social stability, then you open the door to saying, “Well, you know, maybe we should have some kind of religious tests.” Then it is hard to find people who say that all religions are conducive to good civil leadership.

The proponents of the religious test ban framed their support in religious liberty terms. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut said: “The sole purpose and effect of this test ban is to exclude persecution and to secure to you the important right of religious liberty. In our country, every man has a right to worship God in a way which is most agreeable to his conscience. If he be a good and peaceable person, he is liable to no penalties or incapacities on account of his religious sentiment.”

In their book, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (W.W. Norton, 1996), Kramnick and Moore make a big deal out of this religious test ban as the foundation of the secular state. Unfortunately, I think they misconstrued the historical record. They rest their argument on the false premise that, in the minds of the framers, support for the Article Six ban was a repudiation of the concept of religious establishment and a ringing endorsement of a radically secular polity.

In the vast majority of the numerous state constitutions written between 1776 and 1786 -- the period between the Declaration of Independence and the framing of the United States Constitution -- there were very interesting religious test requirements. And these religious test requirements in the state constitutions, very interestingly, coexisted with religious liberty language and non-establishment language. That suggests to me, in the view of the founding generation, that they did not think of religious tests as being either a violation of one’s religious liberty or an establishment of religion.

A Federalist Case

Remember, the Article Six ban was only applicable to federal office holders. My argument is that the Article Six ban was not (contrary to what the good professors are arguing) driven by a secular agenda. Nor was it driven by a renunciation of the concept of religious tests as a matter of principle. Again, that we find these tests in virtually all the state constitutions suggests that there was no mood or sentiment in the country opposing the religious tests. Interestingly, there were delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia who endorsed the Article Six religious test ban but had previously crafted religious tests for their respective state constitutions. What are we to make of this? Are they hypocrites, or was there a radical change of heart on their part? I think the answer is to be found in the framers’ belief in federalism -- the system of government that separates the power of centralized government from regional governments. It is a separation of powers construct.

The framers believed as a matter of federalism that the Constitution denied the national government all jurisdiction over religion, including the authority to administer religious tests. Many in the founding generation supported a federal -- and I underscore federal -- test ban because they valued religious tests required under state laws. Their fear was that if there were a federal religious test, it would displace the existing religious tests that existed in the state constitutions. They were not driven by a renunciation of religious tests because they infringed on religious liberty or established religion; rather, they were trying to preserve and protect the very concept of a religious test.

For many of the states debating this proposed Constitution, the religious test ban did not go far enough in terms of guaranteeing religious liberty under the proposed federal regimes. So a number of states, as you recall, conditioned their support for the Constitution on amendments being added to the document. Of course, this led to the debate over what we now call the Bill of Rights. (Which is a very modern term -- that terminology, “Bill of Rights,” attached to the first eight or ten amendments, is something that only really comes into general vocabulary at the end of the nineteenth century.)

The Bill of (Federalist) Rights

We can draw some points that are important and some that are not so important from the recorded congressional debates concerning the text of the First Amendment; but there are a couple of things that we can say that are not terribly controversial, at least initially, about what this language meant. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The first thing is that, in contrast to England’s ecclesiastical establishment, the framers clearly wanted to avoid a national church like the Church of England. In reality, I think there was a consensus that this was not likely to happen, that it was rather a favorite kind of polemical scare-tactic to raise the prospects. But clearly, the establishment of the First Amendment was not meant to silence religion or to deny it influence in society. It did not require civil government to hold all religions in indifference or even to divest public life of religious discourse, values, or symbols.

A second generally shared belief as to what the First Amendment accomplished was -- and this is a necessary corollary to what I just said -- not only to prohibit Congress from establishing a national church, but it also to deny Congress authority to interfere with existing state-level religious establishments. It was a hands-off policy. The federal government was saying, “We are just not going to allow our hands to touch general matters of religion to the extent that government has a role in any way touching, influencing, or regulating religious exercises or religious faith. That is a state government matter.”

This is a very important point. Let’s not forget that the Constitution provided for a national government of limited authority and strictly delegated powers. Those rights not explicitly entrusted to the federal government were assumed to be reserved by individuals, or the states, as far as it resided with any government authority. It was acknowledged that authority over religion was not extended to the federal regime. The states were free to maintain their own church-state arrangements and policies.

Neither Article Six nor the First Amendment imposed any restrictions or restraints upon the individual states. Indeed, some states retained religious establishments well into the nineteenth century. Each state was free to define the content and scope of civil and religious liberties and structured church-state arrangements pursuant to its own constitution, its own laws, its own declarations of rights, and so forth. In short, the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 had no immediate legal effect on church-state arrangements in the country. None at all. It simply made explicit that which was already implicit, which is that to the extent that government has some connection with religion or ecclesiastical institutions it is done at the state level -- the federal government has no say. It merely made explicit the jurisdictional policies that were already implicit in the constitutional order.

The federal Bill of Rights served a dual purpose: first, to assure the citizenry that the federal government could not encroach upon civil and religious liberty, and second, to guarantee the states that the federal government would not usurp the states’ jurisdiction over civil and religious liberties.

The Bill of Rights, in other words, embodies a strong affirmation of this principle of federalism. In many respects it could be viewed as a states’ rights document. Edward Corwin, the famous constitutional scholar who was Dean of Constitutional Law at Princeton, said this: “The principal importance of the First Amendment lay in the separation which it effected between the respective jurisdictions of state and nation regarding religion rather than in its bearing on the question of the separation of church and state.” Indeed, I think it fair to say that the federalism of the Bill of Rights at the time was generally regarded as far more important than anything else that the Bill of Rights had to say.

What the ‘Wall of Separation’ Really Separated

The same thing could be said of Jefferson’s very famous "wall of separation" metaphor. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Jefferson did not use the wall to articulate some universal general theory of the relationship between church and state. Jefferson’s wall served primarily to separate the states and the nation in matters pertaining to religion, not to separate the ecclesiastical from all governmental authority.

To illustrate, Jefferson’s wall put the federal government on one side by itself, and the church and state governments together on another side of the wall -- very different than what we have today. Putting all government -- federal, state, and local -- on one side, and the church (interpreted broadly as being anything of a religious content or nature or significance) on another is absolutely contrary to Jefferson’s use of his famous metaphor.

The jurisdictional interpretation I am offering here was virtually unchallenged in the founding era. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s words in 1808: “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions: their doctrines, disciplines, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment of religion (the First Amendment), but also from that which reserves to the states that power not delegated to the United States (the Tenth Amendment). Certainly no power to proscribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in religious discipline has been delegated to the federal government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority.” These are Jefferson's words.

This was the view that was affirmed by the Supreme Court, time and again, in the early nineteenth century. Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for an anonymous court . . . in 1833, declared that the liberties (in what we now call the Bill Rights) “contain no expression indicating an intention to apply them to the state governments.” Similarly, Justice Story, in his authoritative commentaries on the Constitution (1883), says “The purpose of the First Amendment was to exclude from the national government all power to act upon the subject of religion.” He further opined that “The whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the state governments to be acted upon according to their own sense of justice and state constitutions.”

Uncomfortable Federalism

This is not the way we think of the First Amendment today. What we see today is that the principle they said was the primary purpose of the First Amendment has been turned right on its head. It couldn’t be more opposite. What do we have? We have the Supreme Court of the United States telling state and local governments, on a whole host of issues, but specifically on this issue of religion, how to govern matters.

Now, I want to make a concluding comment on this principle of federalism -- and I think this is a pretty radical statement. The First Amendment, like Jefferson’s wall, affirmed this policy of federalism. It emphasized the view that all government authority over religious matters was allocated to the states.

Once again, the principal function of the First Amendment was to delineate the legitimate jurisdictions of state and nation on religious issues, and the First Amendment was largely devoid of substantive content apart from federalism. It articulates a hands-off policy. It is the federal government saying that we are not going to deal with this issue because it is already being dealt with by another governmental entity.

So today when we think of the First Amendment as being some sweeping, libertarian, constitutional, prudential sort of doctrine, that is not what was going on in 1787. It was not going on in the nineteenth century. It was a jurisdictional statement. It was not a libertarian statement. It is not a statement about liberty.

This assertion makes a lot of us uncomfortable (wherever we fall on the political spectrum), but if we look at the text and the context, I think we have to conclude that it is futile to locate in, or extrapolate from, the religious meaning of the First Amendment a substantive right or principle of religious liberty. The First Amendment was not calculated to articulate a principle or a theory of religious liberty, but merely to specify who or what level or branch of civil government shall substantially address religious matters.

Explanations for the Constitution’s Silence

So is the Constitution in fact, “godless,” or do we find references to the Deity, to Christian custom, tradition, in the Constitution apart from these references to religion that we find in Article Six and the First Amendment? What arguments or explanations were offered in the late eighteenth century for the absence of references to the Christian religion?

There is an apocryphal story that is told that after the Philadelphia Convention of a pious citizen who lamented that the Constitution failed to mention God or the Christian religion and inquired of Alexander Hamilton the reason for this unfortunate omission. “I declare,” Hamilton is said to have responded. “We forgot it!”

This is a pretty striking comment. Although it is hard to document, this story is retold time and time again in the nineteenth century. George Washington, however, wrote the following: “Here I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To this consideration, we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation respecting religion for the Magna Carta of our country.”

We find a lot of arguments being made in conformity with Washington’s points here that would suggest that there were considered reasons why the Constitution does not make more reference to religion and Christianity.

Politics and Divisiveness?

One argument simply says, “Look, we were trying to create a political document, a document for political objectives, not for religious objectives. Thus it contains but slight references of religious kind.” I think this is a plausible argument, but I don’t think it particularly rings true. Of course, the Constitution was a political, legal document, but other formal legal documents -- and virtually all the state constitutions, in particular -- included substantive statements reflecting a collective piety of some sort, so why didn’t the framers of the Constitution do so?

Madison suggests another argument. At one point there was a concern that using language of a religious nature would raise divisiveness within the Constitutional Convention. There was great diversity in the denominations at the Constitutional Convention. In fact, virtually every major Protestant denomination was represented. So their arguments oftentimes were made that they wanted to avoid this divisiveness. Again, there is some plausibility to it, but this denominational diversity was already in place earlier. We find it in state constitutions, and yet they found language around which even this diversity of denominations could coalesce. Again, I don’t find this argument terribly persuasive.

Assumed Foundations

Another argument was that Christianity was simply assumed by the framers of the Constitution. Robert Baird, who was really the first great student of religion in America, writing in the early nineteenth century, said, “The Bible does not begin with an argument to prove the existence of God, but assumes the fact as one the truth of which it need not attempt to establish.” And then he goes on to say:

Similarly the Constitutional framers, while sensible that it were unwise to make religion a subject of legislation for the general government, thought that this, or any mention of the thing at all, was unnecessary. The Constitution was not intended for a people that had no religion or that needed any legislation on the subject in a proposed general instrument for National government. It was for a people already Christian, and whose existing laws emanating from the most appropriate or to say the least, the most convenient sources, gave ample evidence of their being favorable to religion. Their doing nothing positive on the subject seems accordingly to speak more loudly than if they had expressed themselves in the most solemn formulas on the existence of the Deity and the truth of Christianity. These were clearly assumed, as it were, so well known and fully acknowledged, as to need no specification in an instrument of a general nature and design for general objects.

Significantly, the framers resisted the temptation often encountered by architects of new revolutionary orders. Indeed, the course adopted by the French revolutionary constitution was to institute a wholly new calendar that just ignored the birth of Christ. [You may recall that the French calendar got rid of Sunday.] The framers did not go down that secular direction, which one imagines if they were intent on creating a wholly secular order they might have contemplated.

John Adams makes an interesting point. He says the word, “our,” preceding “the year of our Lord,” refers back to the commencing words of the Constitution, to “We the people of the United States.” It might be argued that the dating of the Constitution, when compared with the commencing clause in the Preamble, constitutes official recognition of the authority of Christ and his religion by the people of the United States. A date, of course, does not a Christian document make. But at the very least, I think we can conclude that the framers paid tribute (whether inadvertently or not is unclear), to Christianity and its calendar.

The Preamble to the Preamble

Still another argument suggests that the Constitution references the Deity in our religious underpinnings. It says that, although the text of the Constitution makes only slight reference to the Deity, God is invoked in the true, if not literal, Preamble to the U.S. Constitution -- the Declaration of Independence. In other words, explicit references to the Deity are found in the Constitution by way of the Declaration of Independence, which it is argued was incorporated in the Constitution.

I need not tell you that there is a lot of controversy about what role the Declaration plays as a part of our organic law. It is officially in the U.S. statutes identified as part of the organic law. The courts have certainly recognized that the Declaration has some relevance in our interpretation of the Constitution. John Quincy Adams, for example, in his very famous address on the Jubilee of the Constitution, makes a couple of points that I think are relevant here. He says,

“The colonies’ first movement in the Declaration was to recognize and to appeal to the laws of nature and to nature’s God for the right to assume the attributes of sovereign powers, an independent nation,” and then he goes on to say, “The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are part of one consistent whole, founded upon one and the same theory of government.”

This notion that the Declaration is organically linked to the Constitution has certainly been around for a long time. At least, eight of the state constitutions of the states and their constitutions following independence incorporated in all or part the Declaration of Independence as their Preamble. For example, the New York Constitution of 1777 says, “Its Preamble is the Declaration of Independence.” So this was not an uncommon phenomenon.

The Sunday Debate

Another set of arguments sometimes made is that one finds implicit acknowledgment of Christian custom in the Constitution. Again, one of the sources oftentimes mentioned here is Article One, Section Seven, the veto provision of the Constitution, which references Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. The debate around the question of what significance we attach to the mention of Sunday was played out in the early part of the nineteenth century.

The veto provision says that when a President vetoes a law, he has to do it within ten days, but Sunday excepted. This debate about the significance of Sunday in the Constitution was probably the most defining church debate in the nineteenth century. That was the “Sunday mail controversy.” In 1810 Congress passed legislation and, almost as a throw-away line, said the Post Office has to be open seven days a week for people who want to pick up their mail. Well, the evangelicals (and I emphasize the word, evangelical -- this is in the early days of the Second Great Awakening) really coalesced around this issue. They said, “This is the first time in the history of the Republic that our National legislature has passed a law disrespectful in any sense to a fundamental Christian institution, Sunday.”

Powerful political coalitions formed around this issue. In fact, I think you could say that what we might call the “religious right” today really has its origins in the early nineteenth century over this very issue. When Congress re-authorized this statute in 1825, the issue exploded again. It became the hot topic of the day. In fact, Congress was forced to issue a report on the issue. They issued a number of reports. The most famous was in 1829 when Congress said that no issue in the history of the Repuiblic (now nearly fifty years old) had generated more mail, more petitions to Congress, than this Sunday mail issue.

Arguments from Common Law

I want to make one last point; that is, another argument is made that the Constitution embraced in its text Christian custom and belief. In some ways, I think this is the most significant argument. There was a familiar refrain of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century that said, “Christianity is the law of the land.” This proposition was based, in part, on a very familiar axiom that Christianity was part and parcel of the Common Law -- the Common Law being the system of jurisprudence that we inherited from the British -- and thus that Christianity was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution through the common law.

In other words, in so far as Christianity is part of the Common Law, and the American people accredited the Common Law in the Constitution, then Christianity is brought into the bosom of the Constitution. This question about whether Christianity is part of the common law is, I would say (and I hope this doesn’t sound like an exaggerated statement) for those of us in the Anglo-American tradition, the most profound state-church question of the millennium. “Is Christianity part of our Common Law, the very fabric of our legal structure?”

Interestingly, this debate played out over the Constitution and throughout the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, the principle discussants in this debate were Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Story. Thomas Jefferson said (with irreverent flourish, I might add) that Christianity neither is or ever was part of the Common Law, while Story maintained that there never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.

Jefferson suggested that perhaps Christianity was not a part of the Common Law because this was one issue, a sole issue, where he could go after his worst enemies. He could attack legal authority, the Common Law, of which he was no great fan, go after Blackstone, of whom he was no great fan, and he could attack the established political religious authorities -- all with one single issue.

Jefferson’s detractors recognized that his position, which was contrary to all the established authority of his day, revealed Jefferson’s true colors, and that is why someone like Story, like most religious traditionalists of the day, thought it imperative that Jefferson not go un-rebutted on the point that Christianity was not a part of the Common Law. So Story was a part of a vanguard that really sort of demolishes Jefferson’s theory. I won’t spin out the arguments, but it was a very interesting debate.

What the Text’s Silence Means

I want to conclude by offering what I think is going on with the text of the Constitution. I have indicated that some of the arguments I find more convincing than others. If it is true that Hamilton reported that the failure to recognize the Deity in the Constitution was a mere oversight, then I think that is truly profound. It is truly significant. It says a lot about the mind-set of the framers. But I don’t think that was probably what was going on. Furthermore, I don’t think this is what the historical records suggest. I don’t think, as commentators today would tell us, that this absence of more explicit references is evidence of a godless Constitution or that the framers set out deliberately to create a secular state.

I think the most plausible explanation for what is going on here is what I discussed earlier; that is, the issue of federalism. The framers of the Constitution did not envision the Constitution being this defining document in the way that we sometimes think of it today. They still viewed the most vital political units of their day to be the state and local governments. That is where the action was. That is where the power was. And that is where the religious underpinnings of social order and stability were so clearly articulated and defined. And again, their concern, by and large, was that if we go out to redefine what those religious underpinnings are, it will only detract from it. It might even displace these underpinnings, which have already been so clearly articulated and defined in state and local charters. They recognized that if they engaged in a new redefinition project, this whole enterprise of creating a new federal government, which was on shaky political grounds, would never gain endorsement. Again, at the state and local level the interaction between the civil order and the religious order was already clearly stated and they did not want to disrupt that position.

Looking back from the late twentieth century, perhaps they made a mistake. They didn’t anticipate the emergence of this monolithic federal state. Maybe they should have taken a different tack, but looking at it from their perspective -- their world view -- and how they envisioned this new creation of the federal regime, I think there are plausible explanations for why they chose not to make the more explicit references that some of their own critics would have hoped that they would have made.